party through parliamentary elections, meetings, the Press and the temper of the members of the trade and other unions, etc. When, in face of the stormy advance of the revolution and the spread of civil war, it became necessary to shift quickly from legal to illegal positions, to co-ordinate them, to resort to "inconvenient" and "undemocratic" methods of picking out or constituting or preserving "groups of leaders," people lost their heads and began inventing all sorts of supernatural nonsense. Probably some members of the Dutch Communist into traditions and conditions of particularly privileged and Party who had the misfortune to be born in a small country, stable legality, who have not known at all what it means to shift from a legal to an illegal position, got themselves entangled and contributed to this muddle.
On the other hand, one notices the superficial and incoherent use of the now "fashionable" terms "masses" and "leaders." People have heard much and have conned by rote all the frivolous attacks on "leaders"—contrasting them with the "masses"—but failed to grasp the application and the inner meaning of these words.
The parting of the ways of "leaders" and "masses" showed itself with peculiar clarity and sharpness in all countries at the end of and after the imperialist war. The principal cause of this phenomenon was many times explained by Marx and Engels in 1852–92 by the example of England. The dominant position of England created in the "masses" a labor aristocracy, petit bourgeois and opportunist. The leaders of this labor aristocracy constantly deserted to the bourgeoisie, and were directly or indirectly in its pay. Marx, to his honor, roused the hatred of these wretches by openly branding them as traitors. The newest (20th century) imperialism has created a monopolist, privileged position for a few advanced countries, and this brought to the surface everywhere in the Second International a certain type of leader-traitors, opportunists, social-chauvinists, who look after the interests of their particular group in the labor aristocracy. This caused the opportunist parties to break away from the "masses," that is, from the greatest mass of the toilers, from the majority of the working-class, from the lowest paid workers. The victory of
